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Susan Wojcicki, Google’s senior vice president of advertising and commerce and one of its earliest employees, will take over as senior vice president in charge of YouTube, Google confirmed today. The move was originally reported by tech news sites The Information Tuesday night and Re/code this morning. Wojcicki succeeds Salar Kamangar, an even earlier Google employee who has headed YouTube since 2010 and is expected to move to another job at Google, possibly at its venture capital arm, to pursue interests in early-stage projects.

In a statement, Google CEO Larry Page provided few details. “Like Salar, Susan has a healthy disregard for the impossible and is excited about improving YouTube in ways that people will love,” he said in the statement. For her part, Wojcicki tweeted: “Excited to join #YouTube – wonderful team, amazing community & inspiring creators. I look forward to watching a lot more videos during work.”

According to insiders, Wojcicki–who has often taken on difficult or complex initiatives such as Google’s book scanning project–was interested in a new challenge. The move for Google’s highest-ranking woman is a lateral one, though from a position responsible for most of Google’s revenues to one heading a smaller but more high-profile unit. In 2006, Wojcicki championed the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube. The deal was seen at the time and for years after as an expensive mistake, but some outsiders value the unit at $20 billion or more today.

The move isn’t entirely a surprise, since there has been continual uncertainty among marketers and ad agencies for at least the past year about who controls the advertising on YouTube. Although the move likely signals an even greater focus on YouTube as a key player in Google’s greater advertising ambitions, big changes at the unit don’t appear to be in the offing anytime soon.

After all, despite constant grumbling by YouTube video producers about ad prices and YouTube’s large cut of same, the video site’s revenues have by all accounts been growing by leaps and bounds. Revenues jumped 51% to $5.6 billion last year, according to eMarketer.

And while YouTube’s ad prices have plateaued or declined thanks to the seemingly infinite number of videos uploaded daily, they’re still an order of magnitude or two higher than standard display ads. Even more important, they attract advertisers more interested in promoting their brands for purchase consideration down the road, in contrast to search ads that prompt an immediate click and sale. The former, image-oriented ads still dominate in traditional media, such as slick magazines and especially television, which at $200 billion worldwide dwarfs online advertising.

Susan Wojcicki

Still, Google clearly has even bigger hopes for YouTube. For the past couple of years, YouTube has been courting more professional, Hollywood-style content from the likes of Amy Poehler and Madonna. But that push for more TV-like channels hasn’t taken off as much as Google had hoped, despite the opening of a glitzy 41,000-square-foot production studio in Los Angeles and other locations.

So more recently, in recognition that the most popular videos and channels on the site are mostly homegrown talent, YouTube has tried to persuade big brand marketers from GE to Unilever to create branded channels and videos that fit the less scripted, more free-form nature of the most popular YouTube videos. This year, Google will open a new YouTube production facility in New York aimed at pushing that initiative ahead.

The move potentially makes Google’s management situation clearer. Wojcicki had shared the same title as Sridhar Ramaswamy, who early last year joined Page’s inner circle of executives, known as the L Team. Ramaswamy has been more focused on the commerce side, with Wojcicki running both search and display ad products, but Ramaswamy will now run all Google ads and commerce.

While some observers believe YouTube needs to attract flashier ads of the sort that work on television, others believe the key will be crafting more ad formats that fit the medium better than 30-second spots. Some of the most popular videos on YouTube are in fact ads, such as Unilever’s Dove Real Beauty Sketches and Red Bull’s Stratos space-jumping sponsorship, that run for several minutes. The appointment of Wojcicki, a longtime product executive in whom insiders say Page has great confidence–she rented out part of her house to Page and cofounder Sergey Brin early on when Google moved out of Stanford–could indicate a greater emphasis on development of new ad formats and methods of targeting and measuring them.

Under Wojcicki’s watch, new ad formats and methods of measuring their impact have migrated from YouTube to the rest of Google’s non-search advertising system, in particular its display ad network that syndicates ads to about 2 million other websites. Developed under Wojcicki and longtime display VP Neal Mohan, so-called engagement ads, which feature videos, games, and even app-like experiences inside display-ad formats, play only when they’re hovered over at least two seconds. They command about double the usual display-ad rates.

The philosophy behind YouTube’s popular TrueView ads that run before videos play, which users can skip and advertisers pay for only when they’re viewed, has infused ads on the Google Display Network as well. Google recently offered the option for advertisers to pay only for ads that have actually been viewed.

If Wojcicki can make YouTube ads more lucrative, that could help quell unrest among YouTube creators complaining that they aren’t getting enough revenue out of their arrangements. That in turn could help discourage them from seeking out alternative means of distribution.

But those are big ifs. And it’s still not clear whether better ad formats, if indeed they can be created, are the key issue vs. others. YouTube’s sizable 45% cut of revenues remains a source of dissatisfaction. More worrisome, it’s unclear whether YouTube can command higher ad prices in the face of so much ad inventory, especially as more people use it on mobile devices with small screens.

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Nothing will change on Youtube. It has its own life as the top video sharing platform in the world. Changing skipper doesn’t make the ship any better or worse than before. Just a change of course isn’t going to affect the whole package

My fear, as a viewer, is that there will be more pressure on channels to accept advertising before their videos or some kind of autoplay ads unrelated to the channel that serve as a gateway to the site; e.g. an ad that must be watched before being taken to your video choice even if it has an opt-out. That would simply be unbearable. I would just ditch using the site if ads become more intrusive.

I do think that better (read: more compelling) ad formats will be the key issue that YouTube will face just for the reason that you noted that “as more people use it on mobile devices with small screens.” They have to figure out how to make ads work with mobile. It seems that FB is starting to work that out, so why not Google. Anyway, the other big problem — the relentless creation of more and more inventory — isn’t just a phenomenon on YouTube itself, but everywhere for video on the web. So that is something that is not controllable nor solvable by any executive.